Clayton Hardiman: Using what you've got

The strangest, least recognizable figure you'll ever meet might be your own reflection — particularly as it shows up in other people’s eyes.

Not long ago I was at a family reunion, talking to a cousin of mine. We grew up on the same street. I heard her describing a family I had never met or even heard of before. It was a family of means, whom she characterized as rich. Somehow they lived unnoticed in our impoverished neighborhood, blending in seamlessly with the economically depressed population, flying under the radar.

That family was us.

I was trying to figure out how she had traveled to such a far-fetched conclusion. Granted, she was one of 14 children, and I was one of just eight. But she had two parents. My mother raised us alone. The phrase “limited means" didn’t even begin to describe her financial condition.

On the other hand, we were never homeless and never went without meals. In fact, when you came to our door, the first thing you were likely to notice was the smell of supper on the stove. Often it was the plainest fare imaginable, but still the aroma was usually enough to make your mouth water, and if there was anything near enough, just looking hungry could wrangle you a dinner invitation.

Even we children used to marvel at the miracles my mother routinely worked out of our meagerly stocked refrigerator.

“Mom,” I remember asking her in the kitchen one night, “just how are you doing this?”

I don’t remember the exact words of her reply, but I believe it was something along the lines of this: Son, you use what God gives you.

Maybe that was what convinced my cousin. Our house smelled rich. More than that, it just felt rich.

So why am I thinking of this now?

I’ve been reflecting on the life of Yelena Bonner, who died June 18 at the age of 88.

To the outer eye, Bonner and my mother couldn’t be more disparate. One was a Jewish ex-Communist, born in what is now Turkmenistan. The other was Christian, born in Pennsylvania, the granddaughter of a slave. Nobody would get them confused.

Bonner was probably best known as the widow of Andrei Sakharov, the famous nuclear physicist, Soviet dissident and human rights activist. It is a title I’m sure she was proud of, but defining her only through her marriage does her little justice. In her own right, she was a powerful voice for human freedom.

Decades before she married Sakharov, she was standing up for political prisoners. By the 1970s, she and her husband were a formidable team, challenging the might of the Soviet state.

Among their weapons was the hunger strike.

Historically, the hunger strike is an age-old form of protest. Its use ranges from the Dark Ages to the 21st century and in countries around the globe. The list of hunger strikers is a roll call of human rights activists. It includes Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Biko, Dick Gregory, Cuban dissidents and British and American suffragettes. Medically it is a dangerous tactic. Hunger strikers risk everything from starvation to blindness to kidney failure. Some hunger strikers are force fed by authorities, and that, too, can be fatal.

In 1981, Bonner joined her husband, a veteran hunger striker, on a campaign to get the Kremlin to let their daughter-in-law join her husband in the United States. The confrontation seemed a mismatch. On one side, there was the political and military might of the Soviet state. On the other, there were these two individuals, about as unformidable as humans come, armed only with conscience and the will not to eat.

In the end, conscience won.

I try to imagine how this was accomplished. There’s a song from the 1990 Broadway musical “The Life,” whose lyrics come to mind:

“You gotta use what you got

To get whatcha want

Before whatcha got is gone ...”

More concise and to the point, there are these words from another tactician, the woman who raised me.